Havana’s Vital Biennial Was Trumped by a Stifled Voice

In its falling-apart gorgeousness, Havana is a stage set for many dramas, past, present and future. Cruise the old Miramar neighborhood, with its mansions and parks, and you’re in the 1950s Sin City of Fulgencio Batista. Head to the center of town, where Che Guevara’s face looms, a colossal logo high over Revolution Plaza, and you hit the socialist 1960s, as hard and unyielding as a cellblock wall. Wander from there in almost any direction and you enter the Havana of today, resiliently tight-belted but, with United States links reforged, a platinum-card paradise-to-be.

It was on this stage, or stages, that the 12th edition of the Havana Biennial unrolled in May and June. And, no surprise, the most interesting art was about change, not polish, and was in the form of events and performances, not things. Things are what most biennials are built around: photographs, sculptures, videos, whatever you can pin a medal on.

Havana did have one object-heavy spectacle, a display of works by 150 Cuban artists inside the 18th-century fortress complex known as the Morro-Cabaña. Under the title “Zona Franca,” or “Free Zone,” the show was broken up into a series of mostly one-artist exhibits distributed through its warrens of rooms and cells. The effect was pretty clearly geared to appeal to art-fair-savvy collectors from outside Cuba. This biennial was the first in 15 years to which Americans could legally travel, and Havana was naturally hoping we would arrive en masse.

At the same time, the biennial’s directors took care to designate “Zona Franca” as an appendage to the larger show itself, which they shaped along very different, dematerializing lines, as suggested by the title “Between Ideas and Experience.” The goal was to shift attention away from objects and toward ideas, to break art out of conventional settings and integrate it into the city and its diverse communities.

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Nikhil Chopra painting while inside a cage in “The Black Pearl.”CreditLisette Poole for The New York Times

This emphasis on context made sense. It raised the right questions in a society that continues to define itself, despite a creeping capitalist economy, as seriously socialist. How can a vital art be made for sharing rather than for private ownership? Who is allowed to decide what is art and what is not? And how, in a period that almost everyone acknowledges to be one of transition, do you create an art in progress, an art that can exist in the public realm and reflect the present, without being prematurely monumental?

To some degree, the biennial addressed these questions soundly. The show was spread all over town, from center to periphery, from museums to ruined factories, from libraries to cinemas to parks. In many cases, the work was elusive. It came and went, was hard to find, took you by surprise, made you wonder: What am I looking at? Art, or an accident, or what?

The biennial’s grand opening, for example, was a funny kind of surprise. The festivities were held in a part of town little associated with art, one of Havana’s oldest neighborhoods, working-class Casablanca, across the harbor from the city center. According to the official program, the neighborhood would be chock-full of new art — video, sculpture and so on — with some starry global names attached. But there was hardly any of that. What there was instead was an unannounced performance: a conga band came dancing into town and wound its way through it, pulling residents and visitors alike into a jubilant homage to the distinctive globalism of Cuba’s Afro-Caribbean culture.

It was the first of many performances to come. Participants from abroad brought some. In a cobblestone plaza in Old Havana, the Indian artist Nikhil Chopra locked himself in a cage for three days and silently painted beautiful images of what he could see from behind bars. His was a shrewd take on the notion of island-artist. And when he finally hacksawed his way free late one night, a delighted crowd gathered to greet him, and followed him down the street, Pied Piper style.

If you wandered into an installation titled “This Is Exchange,” by the Berlin artist Tino Sehgal at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, the biennial’s headquarters, you were greeted by an attendant who requested that you define the term “market economy.” The test was pass/fail. If you said anything at all, you passed, and were rewarded with a Cuban peso, a coin utterly valueless outside the island’s bizarre dual-currency system.

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Yilam Sartorio in the opera “Cubanacán.”CreditRicky Opaterny

The wonderful Cuban-American artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (she gives off sparks), who now teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, brought a group of her students to Casablanca a few days after the opening. At midday in the now-quieter neighborhood square, the students asked residents if they would answer some questions about issues in the news: What did they think about the re-establishment of relations with the United States? What reactions did they expect from Americans? Did they think that art could help in cross-cultural conversations? The residents sat down and replied, writing in notebooks provided by the students. Their focused and unreserved participation in Ms. Campos-Pons’s performance was a yes to the last question. Some of their responses, including furious vocal complaints about Raúl Castro’s government, were startlingly unguarded. Could it be, one wondered, that art really did constitute a censorship-free zone here?

The thought occurred again during a performance of a new opera by the Cuban composer Roberto Valera and the Berkeley, Calif., librettist Charles Koppelman, which had its world premiere at the National Art Schools. Called “Cubanacán,” it is based on the life of the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro. In 1961 he was commissioned by Fidel Castro to design and build the schools, which, with their serpentine coils and humps, remain an extraordinary sight. Five years later he had to flee the country. Cuba had come under Soviet sway, and his funky, sexy structures were judged to be far too idiosyncratic, meaning politically incorrect.

On a first listening, the opera, too, seemed to push against official cultural norms. Its hero is a refugee from the revolution; it pokes fun at Che and Fidel Castro. But no harm done. The jokes are mild. And Mr. Porro, who died last year, was eventually invited back. By allowing his story to be told, the government assumed a strategic veneer of tolerance. It has always used culture to soften the face it turns to the world, and continues to. And along these lines, it was valuable to know that while “Cubanacán” was being presented, censorship of another, quite different performance was underway.

It had been taking place daily since December, when the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, who has a peripatetic international career, returned home to Havana. Her arrival coincided with the announcement of the political rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. Implicit in this development was the idea that Cuba would gradually loosen up on its policing of public dissent. Ms. Bruguera decided to stage a public performance that would put that to the test.

The piece, titled “Tatlin’s Whisper #6,” is one she has presented before, at the 2009 Havana Biennial and abroad. Its basic components are simple: She sets up a microphone and invites anyone who wishes to speak to do so, uncensored, for one minute. This time, to raise the potential for provocation, she planned to have the event take place in Revolution Plaza, the political equivalent of sacred ground.

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Tania Bruguera reads from Hannah Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” at her home.CreditEnrique De La Osa/Reuters

Official reaction was swift. As soon as she announced her intentions, the police took her into custody on charges of disrupting public order. The authorities confiscated her Cuban passport and threatened to bring her to trial. If she ventures beyond the city limits, she has been warned, she can be expelled from the country and prevented from returning. Her case has gone nowhere since. (Ten days ago, she was told that the case was being temporarily closed and that she could reclaim her passport and leave the country. But as she is well aware, the case could be reopened in her absence and a sentence of exile passed.)

Despite her legal limbo, she has not been silent.

To coincide with the opening of the biennial, she undertook a live reading with volunteers of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” The reading took place on the ground floor of her home. While it was in progress, a government-hired road crew appeared with jackhammers to drown out the voices. When the reading was finished and she left the house, the book under her arm, the police swooped in, hustled her into a car and drove her away for hours of questioning.

The influential Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera and several non-Cuban colleagues who were in town for the biennial witnessed the incident. Many other instances of harassment have gone unseen. Few fellow Cubans are willing to come to her defense, mostly, no doubt, out of fear. Although she has drawn vigorous support from abroad, her presence has been shadowy since her initial arrest last December. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of Internet connectivity on the planet. Apart from spotty email exchanges and Yo También Exijo (“I also demand”), a Facebook page maintained by her sister, Ms. Bruguera is from day to day pretty much incommunicado, though fully on the Cuban government’s radar.

Whatever the end result, her performance must be counted a success, because it is enveloping, seamless and unstoppable. Every time the police pick her up or otherwise confront her, these officers play their assigned roles; every legal obstacle thrown her way extends the run of the performance, thickens the plot, darkens the mood and exposes realities that Cuban officialdom, including members of the local art establishment, may prefer us not to consider.

There is much we can learn from the 12th Havana Biennial — a performed, dematerialized show — about what art can be, where it can exist and who it is for. From Ms. Bruguera’s performance, we are learning what art can do — risky, truth-revealing things — for artist and audience alike. It may well be that her performance, end not in sight, is the one for which this biennial will be remembered.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about the Havana Biennial translated incorrectly the phrase Yo También Exijo, which is the name of a Facebook page maintained by a sister of the artist Tania Bruguera. It means “I also demand,” not “I still exist.”

The article also misspelled the surname of a Cuban composer. He is Roberto Valera, not Varela. And a picture caption with the article misspelled the given name of the artist who created the artwork “Undertow.” He is Arlés del Rio, not Arels.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Havana’s Vital Biennial, Trumped by a Stifled Voice . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe